For portable electronics products, important considerations during product development are cost, weight, and battery service time. Low power techniques are heavily applied to extend the battery service time, among which lowering the operating voltage is the most efficient way to save power (and energy) due to the quadratic relationship between power and voltage. But the operating speed decreases significantly as the voltage scales down. Thus, to improve the performance for low operating voltages is an important issue.
State-of-the-art designs are synchronous, where all operations are synchronized with common clock signals, and the design verification, testing, and EDA methodologies are mature. However, the operating speed of synchronous designs depends on the slowest operation. In deep-submicron technologies, the delay variation of operations grow significantly, especially when the circuits are operated under low operating voltages.
The disclosed embodiments are directed to overcoming one or more of the problems set forth above.